


Thunderer

by kkamagui



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route Spoilers, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-09-27 16:49:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20411074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kkamagui/pseuds/kkamagui
Summary: But it has been years. New charge or not, Felix is used to the fit that feels slightly off-kilter but is not. He adjusts his gauntlets again. Pulls the shivering light that is his saber out of the fried carbon fiber body. The smell of ozone fills the air as the corpse cools, no longer heated by the photon-hot severity of his weapon.





	Thunderer

**Author's Note:**

> (slapping felix) this bad boy can fit so much anger in it

* * *

On the first dawn of a new year, Garreg Mach stands tall and bright and neon: the brilliant nexus of a tri-city dominion replete with micron-glass panes and strato-high holo spires. It is near blinding and appears as a sister star to even those spectating in higher reaches. When the sunrise crush over the horizon at last swallows the night, it is still hard to say which of the two points shine brighter. 

In the moons following the Adestrian nationwide blackout, much of the glorified assembly bleeds into garish, skull-numbing red before—blessedly—returning to dark and empty spiderweb architecture. In the early weeks, signs would flicker as ominous portents of what had once been and what had come to pass. Soon enough the last dredges would flow into the power packs of the desperate, enough for heat and energy to last a week at most. 

If there is light in Garreg Mach, one would do well to stay away.

Though he is loath to leave the Tri-Spire overwhelmed with degenerates and half-flesh half-metal corpses, Felix answers his father’s call to defend the supply lines and rout small rebellions. 

The crowded verticality of Fhirdiad is ill-suited for long-term defensives, but the people know its streets and hidden corners well. While destruction runs rampant in the neo-suburbia of Faerghus, the capital itself is resolute and steel until the heir apparent is announced traitor. The city is hushed, silenced from anticipation and fear from self-preservation.

It happens first thing in the morning. The Boar is executed, miserably and privately. No one is allowed to view the execution barring Cornelia’s henchmen, so Felix instead finds a perch with a clear view of the fallen Tri-Spire. He has forcibly torn out his headpiece, irritated by the incessant pinging of notifications from duty and concerned rabble. Over the static of his ear’s mending synthetics, the air is heavy with a sound like thunder and storm.

He wonders for a brief moment how Dimitri will be killed. Will they make it quick, override his circuits with enough energy to power a city? Will they bleed his systems out until he is nearly delirious from the taste of alkaline over his tongue? Drug him with nano-machine infested poison to disseminate him from the inside-out? Will they—will he fight back with rabid fervor, skin overrun with cyan-indigo wiring and eyes ablaze—

A deep, bone-shuddering tremor shakes all of Fhirdiad. Sylvain’s voice crackles over the disconnected headpiece, clear and unclear all at once. His chest tight with anger, Felix crushes the metal under his heel and turns away, eyes shut tight.

* * *

He is consumed by an unending ache of unfulfillment. His saber never lies idle, flashing bright and blinding whenever he has reason to swing it. Felix sees human and biomechanical terror and human-facade-wearing beasts fall by his hand and it is never enough.

With a frustrated grunt, he readjusts his gauntlets. They had been meant for Glenn, with processors inscribed with his name in gold circuitry and only the best personalized design. Though they have never seen another wearer, bear no other impressions but his own, Felix always feels as though they are perhaps one size too big. Checks them again and again, just to be sure—snug fit. Perfect fit. The disconnect is all mental, purely organic.

_ Could always get a recalibration_, Ingrid’s voice echoes in his head, delicate and sharp enough of an imitation to be real. _ I’m sure it has something to do with your processors not taking to the new charge. _

But it has been years. New charge or not, Felix is used to the fit that feels slightly off-kilter but is not. He adjusts his gauntlets again. Pulls the shivering light that is his saber out of the fried carbon fiber body. The smell of ozone fills the air as the corpse cools, no longer heated by the photon-hot severity of his weapon.

A sneer curling the edge of his lips, he nudges at the body with his foot. This one seems to be too well-integrated to disappear with a simple forced shutdown. No matter. Felix charges up his blade again, driving it into the sinewy cables of the inert creature’s neck. The stench of ozone grows thicker; the carbon mesh of once-human now-beast slowly disintegrates like ash in the wind. Beneath the shield of his light visor, Felix’s eyes flash blue once, unseeing.

* * *

* * *

The Tri-Spire slowly rekindles, the dark of its long-emptied veins filling with light. It makes Felix feel strange. He has long before cast empty stares out at the black web on the horizon. Now, with the streets once again crowded with people who are neither target nor foe, he is antsy. Twitchy. He had only returned on a whim and sentimentality he should have rid of years ago, and now there is far too much for him to process.

In the lower reaches of Garreg Mach, the professor finds Felix mindlessly calibrating his blade: rerouting the wires, slowly curling bare fingers around the hilt and waiting for the brief heat of the connection to flare between skin and metal, staring into the wavering blue bolt as though it holds all the answers to his questions. Perhaps it does. Perhaps it reminds him of something.

He had not bothered with calling out the Boar’s name upon their bitter reunion. Most of the class has changed—new upgrades, better personalized armor, faster processors, _ progress_. Felix had watched the Boar list side to side, singular eye directed at the shadows by his feet. Tall, sullen and unanswering. Unhearing and unseeing to the world before him.

“Felix,” says the professor. No pleasantries, cutting to the chase. She keeps her voice deceptively level for one who has just been handed a million responsibilities on a platter much too small. “Want to spar?”

He stares at the figure in sleek, unchanged body armor; an unimposing figure with the battle presence of ten cyber-enhanced battalions on the field. The question does not quite register in his head until it is too late, by which he means that the professor has evidence of his distracted state.

“Yes,” he says, not soon enough.

“You’re bothered.” _ By Dimitri _ goes unsaid.

Felix glares down at his hand, gripping his saber more tightly. The photon edge flares brightly, its connection like a searing brand in his palm. Without the gauntlets to dull the potency of the sword’s link, it feels raw, overwhelming and unwieldy in his hand. 

“I am not _ bothered_.”

They do spar, eventually. Despite all the professor’s years spent asleep and Felix’s time spent chasing battle, he still finds himself struck down as easily as a tree in a storm, weathering hits and parries until his fingers and arms have grown numb. He stares up at the point of his professor’s blade. It is no more than a practice holoweapon, but he is hit with the vision of a familiar ghastly glow anyways. Remembers Sylvain’s despairing eyes and the gruesome twisting of organic and synthetic into something horrible.

He cannot feel his fingers. May have dislodged a few connections and loosened a couple wires. The gauntlets are meant to prevent that, to protect the organic bits he has not bothered to convert from overexposure to the charge of his weapon. Felix stares down at his hand after he sets the training weapon on its polished rack, a little surprised to see actual blood. 

Felix is unwilling to let anyone see, but Sylvain somehow catches a glimpse and reports it to Ingrid, who then corners him outside the chrome arch of the dorm entrances. For a moment he wonders how she had discovered him so _ quickly_. Then he remembers that he had forcibly wrenched the networking port from his neck a year prior and can no longer relay or receive signals from his friends. She and Sylvain can still communicate with hardly a word said, but he—he has but silence. He wonders if the Boar still has his implanted.

Ingrid’s stare is hard and unforgiving, softening only when the blood drips over and down his wrist in a dark trail.

“Felix,” she says softly, as though she understands the heartbreak and sorrow and all of the supposed-to-be-nonexistent emotions warring in his mind.

He does not look at her. The next time he wears his gauntlets, his skin aches although the synthetics have already healed.

* * *

In between battles, Felix does not listen to common sense and decides to watch over the mess the Boar has become.

With no small amount of disdain, Felix eyes the glowing pulse of Dimitri’s armor. It has all but melded into the skin, looking every bit like the biomechanical horrors he has been dispatching for the last few years. The poor prince and his pale skin, pallid and gaunt beneath the blue plasma glow of his weapon. Were anyone to try taking the armor off, flesh would come away with it, revealing bone and whatever terrible ligaments and circuitry hold a monster together.

Shadows a grim halo around his haunted, haunted eye of ice. Felix can stare for an eternity into the Boar’s cruel eye and he will not be seen back. 

The years blur together, the countless faces and non-faces of those he has killed morphing into a single ugly winged creature, then into the hunching beast before him. Felix barely stops himself from spitting at the ground. 

He has, to his silent shame, considering leaving Faerghus. Abandoning everything that defines his past. With the amount of blood on his hands and the blood he is willing to spill, Felix is almost certain that the Adestrians would welcome him with dripping red arms. He coils tighter around his innermost thoughts, face souring as he watches Dimitri brush off the professor’s futile attempt at conversation.

_ I’m not upset_, he constantly tells the professor, who needles him to join for tea just this once. It is only half a lie. Felix knows that he is livid, blood boiling and with enough momentum that he feels a single nudge will send him careening out of orbit. 

Glenn, dead. His stupid, ignorant father: dead! The anger inside of him howls, demanding the sort of retribution that Felix knows is limited to mindless beasts and their blind pursuits of headless emperor gods. Perhaps he is no better. He cannot sleep with this realization—and seethes.

* * *

The Boar seeks him out after a severe storm, the kind of storm that rushes through a city built with future time-space and possibilities in mind and renders it mute beneath the torrent of rain. Felix had been training outside when the storm hit; even wearing his gauntlets, the weapon current had overcharged, leaving his fingers stiff and trembling with sparking tension.

In the evening, the sheer magnitude of light from the Tri-Spire makes it impossible to see nighttime in true darkness. At the Observatorium, thirty ticks out from the main cluster of the city, one can nearly see the barest glimmer of galaxy in the sky. Nearly.

Felix gazes out at the near-emptiness, fists clenched around seizing bouts of static.

“You may want to be refitted,” the Boar says after several minutes of silence. His movements are quiet over the chrome floors despite his bulk, boots installed with anti-magnetic drives. Before they had never been powered on, and the Boar would simply announce his terrible presence with the echoing weight of his footsteps and deafening crackle of his weapon, never powered down. On the field he had sounded like a storm, spinning and striking in relentless arc and thunder. This silent, lethal presence feels wrong.

“Piss off,” says Felix.

There is no apology. Felix has never been one to fall for pretty words, and the Boar seems to remember this. He settles a good distance away from Felix; in other words, outside of sword-reach.

“I’m kidding, mostly,” he continues. “I asked Ingrid and Sylvain if they still had your measurements and already—”

“Why are you still talking?” Felix says. “Practicing mimicry of human conversation? I can never tell with the likes of you.”

“You’ll find the new gauntlets in your room,” Dimitri finishes, looking Felix in the face. His eye is a shocking, shocking blue. Felix almost freezes in place, long unused to the electricity of actual eye contact. He looks away, seconds too late.

“I don’t need your damn help,” he mutters, glaring out at the crepuscule divide of far-off night and Garreg Mach. “If you need someone to hold your hand then ask the professor.”

“Goodnight, Felix.”

He breathes out slowly with his fingers clenched tight, unable to forget the flare of brilliant blue haunting his every nightmare. The air rumbles with the sound of distant, encroaching thunder.

* * *


End file.
